have particularly high rates of turnout. However, the direction of this bias is ambiguous:
the presence of a BNP candidate may bring some disillusioned whites to the polls, but it
may also serve to mobilize ethnic minority voters who feel threatened by the BNP’s
activities. With aggregate data, it is impossible to correct the estimated size of the white
electorate for these possibilities. However, with the available data, this adjustment seems
to be the best possible approximation of the BNP’s support among white voters in a ward.
Independent Variables
Ethnic Diversity –The presence of a large ethnic minority population may lead to
material conflict between whites and non-whites over economic resources (e.g., jobs and
housing), competition in the political arena, and/or disputes over cultural symbols (e.g.,
language and dress). For these reasons, the racial threat hypothesis argues that as the
relative size of a minority ethnic group increases, the majority population increasingly
sees that group as a “threat” to their traditional privileges and, consequently, becomes
more hostile to the minority group and more likely to vote for an extreme right party.
The extant literature on voting for extreme-right parties typically has operationalized
racial threat by including a measure of the relative size of the immigrant population.
While this may be sufficient for European countries where the immigration of non-whites
is a rather recent phenomenon, it is not for present-day England, where approximately
half of the ethnic minority population is native-born.
Moreover, it is crucial not to treat the various ethnic minority groups in England
as a monolithic “non-white” population. There are important cultural and socio-
economic differences between the three largest minority groups that may affect the
character of the relations between whites and members of these groups. Caribbean blacks
7
It should be noted that studies of voting for the National Front in Britain in the 1970s had to use country
of birth as a proxy for ethnicity, because the Census did not collect ethnicity data until 1991.
19
Convention